_About

You're probably wondering why this site exists.

Fair. I ask myself most days.

It's where I experiment and crash things. I built it from scratch, and every version I've ever shipped still runs, which you can go and poke at.

It keeps my web work sharp and it keeps the personal stuff separate from the commercial stuff. Some of what's here could be commercial one day. Sanctuary, Offshore, The Kicker, Octopus.

A senior developer once told me that the longer you do this, the more you notice what you don't know, and that the job is learning to be comfortable with that. He was right. I know a fraction of this field. In twenty years I expect to know a slightly larger fraction of a much bigger field, because this stuff changes constantly, so the gap will look about the same size it does now. Unknown unknowns. Software is humbling about them.

Which means if you stop learning, you don't hold your position. You get worse, because everything around you moved and you didn't. Degree or no degree. Genius or not.

So what I'm building is the habit, not the finished article. Keep learning, keep trying things, stay curious, let it stack up. The evidence is on this page.

SanctuaryOffshore Property MapThe KickerOctopus

Why I love this work

The honest answer.

I never got into software for the paycheck. I got into it to help people at scale and to use the creative side of my brain. Money matters, of course, but if it means earning a bit less and loving what I do, that's the trade I'll take every time.

I'm always trying to improve my code and my fundamentals, because that's the only part of this job that doesn't change every few years. Whatever I'm learning, I build something alongside it. Some of those side projects have properly kicked on since, and they're how I keep going deeper on one thing over time.

Software should give people time back, not take it from them. Most of what I build is aimed at that: making tech adapt to humans rather than the other way round.

What I build with

The tools I actually reach for, grouped by where they sit in the stack.

ReactJavaScriptTypeScriptHTML/CSSVite

How I got here

From a standing start in 2022 to AI systems in production, by way of the DWP and a lot of debugging.

The Beginning
2000s

Jailbreaking an iPod Touch, obsessed with The Matrix, and always the one with app ideas and no way to build them.

Everything but code
2014-20

Two seasons of Victorian Premier League cricket in Melbourne, commercial diving, paraplanning in financial services, and a conveyancing desk in Southport. Not a line of code in any of it.

DWP Work Coach
2021-23

Twenty appointments a day, 150 people on the caseload, and I could only ever help one of them at a time. That's the whole reason I moved into software.

First line of code
Early 2022

From a standing start, teaching myself around a full-time job at the DWP. Cloud Engineering and Data Science bootcamp with The Growth Company in 2023.

Fuelius
2023-24

Eighteen months as an apprentice full-stack developer at a HubSpot partner agency. Twelve named clients, an NHS trust among them. Level 4 apprenticeship, studied 2023-24. Made redundant December 2024.

AiTomatic
2024-now

Started building under AiTomatic. Solo, self-funded, no clients yet. RAG pipelines, multi-agent tooling, an entity-resolution engine across two government registers, and Sanctuary on native iOS, on-device. Not being pursued commercially while I look for full-time work.

That's the background. Want a chat?

I'm after a full-time role: junior for general software, any non-senior level for AI. If that lines up with something you're hiring for, I'd like to hear about it.